Attracting and keeping the top talent is already a major issue for companies that are fervently competing for the skills of available young workers. As the resource pool of younger workers begins to dry up, employers will begin to look to the ranks of more mature people aged 45 and older to fill the void. All the existing paradigms about work, reward, advancement, motivation and personal growth will have to change to attract the much needed 45 year old and older employee.

The carrots that attract and retain a 24-year-old may not necessarily trip the trigger of a 48-year-old. If companies want to attract the gray-haired crowd in the future, they wil have to deal with some prevalent ageist biases today. Business today is characterized as high performance and innovative; and these two descriptors conjure up images of youth. Are high productivity and innovation the exclusive mindscape of the young?

The Watson Wyatt study “Managing the Workplace of the Future” states:

The acceptance of the psychological link between innovation and youth is so strong that many employers will need to develop ways to create innovative cultures that are age irrelevant… They will need to create cultures that engage people and motivate performance regardless of age. In the same way that companies have invested in the renewal of their operations over the past decade, they will now have to invest in the renewal of their human capital.

The changing demographics are bound to affect an organization’s ability to produce and compete in the marketplace. What will happen to a company’s productivity if all of its experience and intellectual capital continue to take the “retirement” exit ramp with no one to fill the voids? How long will it take this company to replace and retrain to the level of the departing talent? Technological advancements can help in dealing with some of the human capital loss issues, but there is no technology available to fill the void of personal knowledge and experience. At first glance the popular high-performance work culture of today seems at odds with a predominantly older workforce. Companies may have to overcome the idea that high performance means youth. Then again, maybe they won’t have to convince the 50+ generations of that idea at all. I would expect the 50+ generations to contradict the paradigms of youth-related innovation, productivity and competitiveness, just as they’ve crashed through every other paradigm in their revolutionary life span.